At present, the traditional way of advertising or publishing advertisement in an outdoor environment, typically known as out-of-home advertisement, is by means of a physical advertising medium such as billboard or a signage or a hoarding generally placed at the top of designated market areas. The physical advertising medium may be a large outdoor advertising structure, typically found in high traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Further the physical advertising medium renders large advertisements to the passing pedestrians and drivers located primarily on major highways, expressways or high population density market place.
In one scenario, the physical advertising medium acts as either basic display units or static display units that showcase preloaded advertisements such as shop hoardings, sale signs, glass display boards, displaying static information or preloaded advertisements. These are conceptualized for human consumption (via human vision) and are limited by display area/space available. In such a scenario, the physical advertising medium (billboards, signage or display boards) are generally placed outdoors which are mostly missed by people while commuting or roaming in the high population density market place. Further at times it also becomes a means of distraction for the drivers or commuters while driving the vehicle at a high speed on a highway or within a city. In another scenario, the physical advertising medium act as dynamic display units which are communicatively connected with a server for dynamically displaying the information stored on the server. In such scenario, it brings out the dependency on network connectivity for dynamically updating the information to be displayed on the physical advertising medium as some times the physical advertising medium may be intermittently or not continuously connected with the server due to network congestion or network failure. In another scenario, the physical advertising medium is located at a location where network connectivity is not present, and the need to make it dynamic rather than static with manual updates.
It has been further observed that many promoters tend to spend a large investment amount on promoting their businesses through billboards or signage or business establishments that are placed in the most happening places of the city which are in close proximity to attract customer attention. These methods may provide certain rate of success but are expensive and time consuming. Even after spending such a large investment amount, there is a high chance that the published information on advertisements is being overlooked by the people passing by these physical advertising mediums. Most of the people or commuters, while utilizing public transports (bus, train etc.), may not even notice the advertisements published on the billboard/signage located at different locations due to closed vehicles as the vehicles are having limited window area. Due to these limitations, advertisers' establishments are at enormous loss as they have to keep investing on the physical advertising mediums to promote or advertise their products or services by making bigger, flashier, attention grabbing billboards/signage and place them at plurality of different places to attract potential users or people as most of them either do not pay attention or may just miss seeing the billboards, signage or display boards while passing through their vicinity.
With the consistent technical advancement in the field of telecommunication and wireless communication, the advertisements and other information has started reaching the users carrying a mobile communication device via pop-up ads on browsers and installed applications or via user initiated actions like Bluetooth ad messages or QR code scanning. Now-a-days, various users of the mobile communication devices have been targeted for receiving advertisement information sent by an establishment using wireless communication means. In order to receive such information, the user manually initiates the communication for receiving the information from the corresponding establishment.
The manual establishment of communication with the physical advertising medium may not be beneficial. For example, till the time the user initiates the communication with the physical advertising medium, the physical advertising medium may not be within the range of the user and hence the information displayed on the physical advertising medium may not be rendered on the user's device, though the user was interested in consuming said information. This is because; the user may be driving vehicle at speed, and hence is unable to capture the information displayed. Further, the present art lacks in broadcasting the information to other devices through a single device in the range of the physical advertising medium. Additionally, there is no provision in the art that enables the user to communicate with the multiple physical advertising mediums deployed in same location.
Thus, in view of the lacunae observed in the art, a long-felt and unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.